Buckeye Jim
by BecomingMoreLikeAlfie
Summary: Sebastian Moran is being held in solitary confinement. He writes about Jim, his final days and how being confined to a wheelchair ultimately killed the Napoleon of crime. Rated M for violence and to be safe. Constructive criticism will be appreciated!


My name is Sebastian Moran. I will always be the second most dangerous man in London. I'm also in prison, being held in long-term isolation, only broken with annual visits from the IceMan. He gave me a Moleskin, a pencil and a sharpener two months after I was captured. All he said was,

"Write for me."

He whispered it and put his hands through my hair, I tried to grab him by the throat and smash his stupid ginger skull against the door. I was unconscious before I could even snarl.

I was left a note.

"Dearest Sebastian,

Tell me about James."

I tore it into tiny pieces and ate it. Three weeks later, I got bored.

This wouldn't be for the IceMan, it would be for Jim and I.

Jim hadn't been well for a long while. Not his usual self. Less work to do, not being able to confront the Virgin and pretending to commit suicide had hit both of us hard.

It surprised me when I realised Jim had taken the brunt of it.

The dark, razor days were more frequent. He'd pull all the curtains shut, sit motionless on the sofa and play with his favourite razor. I'd sit on the carpet by the door in case he hurt himself. I would just watch the shadows and try appreciate my time with him. I had known from the very start that neither of us would live to fifty. But the razor days told me that the judgement day was getting closer all the time. Last Tuesday he was about to do it. Slit his own throat. I stopped him. Just.

I got scared like that a lot.

Though, it's not like I can take his toys away from him.

Being desperately in love with a psychopath was- is hard. All the time there was danger. We were hunted from day one, Jim loved the games as much as I did, loved their stupidity. He kept me. He said I was extraordinary, that I was his foil. Jim would swing back and forth like a maniacal pendulum, I would watch and make sure he wasn't knocked from his perch. His eyes would drill into me, making tiny holes to find their purchase. They were huge, soulless and so much like some ridiculous, unfathomable vortex. What I loved was that Jim always had this undeniable urge to be remembered, I supplied that.

It gave me meaning. I spread fear, rumours, tales and lore.

My work was rewarded with me being allowed to "sit at Daddy's feet". A supreme privilege, denied to the beggars and scrapers. I was the most talented. The most dangerous. The most beautiful. To live with him was the greatest nightmare, the most surreal experience and the grotesque fantasy of a driven man. Some days he would bake cake. Some days he would sit in the bath for hours. Some days he would wrap civilians in tin foil and leave them in the cupboard. Some days he would scream. Some days he would laugh. He was always a man of extremes, striving towards the interesting and terrifying.

The good days were be few and far between after the Fall. Rare and beautiful.

I want everyone to know that the Virgin wasn't the only one who fell that day.

We would maybe go invest some time into some torture and the best bit was the painting. Jim was particularly affectionate after a personal job, but he still only did hugs when blood or high trade was involved. Once I traded three nights sleep for a quick hug because my father had passed away. He had kept me awake with pins, blood and horror stories. The trades weren't always a macabre as that, once I traded my favourite socks, a particularly nice banana and my current deck of cards. That was one of Jim's more generous days.

We might go out and I'd buy him a new suit, a pair of trainers, maybe even a new CD. About a month ago, I bought him a Burl Ives disk, he laughed and called me a silly teenager. The same day, he fell in the street.

I still feel like that was my fault.

Jim couldn't get up by himself and he needed help the whole way home. He had another razor night but wouldn't let me in. I sat outside the door the whole night, waiting for him to come to bed. I prayed for him to lie with me and press his cold feet to my legs, to hear him breath his nightmares into me. Anything to be close to him.

At about three in the morning I heard movement from the messy living room. I clattered into the room to find Jim curled on the ground a few metres from the sofa, he was swearing and struggling like he was wrapped in chains. I had no choice but to pick him up and replace him on the couch, give him a cigarette and quietly leave.

I am a bit of a silly teenager. But I don't care. I love him and he's only human.

About a week later, after a few important single bullet jobs, I finally convinced Jim to come to the hospital with me. He had been wobbling around on stolen crutches, his indignation was polluting the house and tripling our usual death count. We found out that there was something wrong with his legs. The doctors kept telling me that there was nothing they could do. I didn't understand what happened, no matter how much they explained. I just couldn't fathom it, it didn't make any sense.

I killed two of them out of anger.

Wheelchair bound Jim. It comes up under impossible and stupid in my mind. But that ridiculous thought had become a crushing reality.

He wouldn't bounce around the kitchen making pastry and cakes with cucumber in them to send to the IceMan. Jim wouldn't dance with me. He wouldn't run down the street with somebody's briefcase, calling for me to hurry up. He wouldn't climb trees, or monuments, or fences. Not anymore.

I still loved him.

People find it hard to imagine that one of the best snipers in the world could love. Well, when I say people, I clearly mean my mother. Mum had mentioned that she always imagined me dying alone and for a long time so had I. It's not wrong to love, we're all human. We have to love something or we die. A few years ago it used to be me and my CheyTac M200. I was searching for work and a barman told me that Jim was looking for someone to do some cheap kill work with no strings attached. I turned out to be a rather useful string after I saw how sick in the head he was. I was attached to him. Addicted to his ruthlessness. His danger. It started out with me just killing obstructive family members and thugs, but that turned into making sure Jim wasn't being followed. In time I was killing people very close to Jim. I was his personal body guard and it didn't take him long to realise that I would easily die for his safety. Loyalty melted into a slow burning love.

Jim bought his own wheelchair, with the help of Alfie, the terribly average and unassuming lackey. I couldn't. It made me too angry. I punched the wall when it was brought in. Broke three knuckles. It was sleek and black and inconspicuous and... Hateful. He slapped me. Told me to wise up and get a grip on myself or he would leave me. I stopped. I'm not ordinary like the others, remember? He brought me a new pair of sunglasses as well, he knew how sensitive my eyes are. I carried him around the house though, he loved it. He would tease me and joke just like normal. I carried him to the bath and washed him. I carried him to bed and held him.

I told him all the things I loved about him.

The interesting torture techniques, how long he took in the bathroom, how he coiled and slithered in his sleep. How he was the most enchantingly odd, terribly dangerous, psychotic man I have ever met. I whispered for hours, rubbed his sore legs. He grinned and told me I was a pansy. I laughed and told him I didn't care anymore. I loved him, so I told him that. He didn't laugh then. Jim went all sullen and commanded me to sleep because I wouldn't have the energy to carry him, like the King deserved to be.

We had a quiet, pleasant day after that, Jim watched me cook for him and arranged a mass murder in Suffolk. I put on his Burl Ives CD, Jim always had a thing for folk music. I did a bit of cleaning, blood stains on the roof, honestly I have no idea sometimes. Got rid of a couple of bodies, three (seemingly unconnected) places precisely specified by Jim. He obviously had someone set up to take that for him. The man who would take the whip for this was married and elderly, it reminded me of Dad and I gave him a Snickers before I left. Slightly disheartened, I was glad to get home. I danced for Jim, made tea and got out custard creams. Generally tried to avoid the selection of internal organs in the fruit bowl. Cringed loudly when I found a heart in the bread box. I turned around, about to ask when we got the organs in, only to see Jim cheerfully holding a gun to his temple.

A real one.

I went into panic mode, dropped the custard creams and leapt across the room. I snatched it out of his hand, flinging it behind the TV and snarled at Jim. That gun was new.

How the fuck did he get that? I would soon kill Alfie over it.

I grabbed his wasted shoulders and shook him. Asking him over and over.

Why. Why would he do that.

Jim pressed a finger to my lips and clamped his eyes shut.

It took a few red seconds for me to realise the song in the background.

Buckeye Jim.

Every day after that one had been a razor night. I sat on one end of the sofa, watching him. Talking about nonsense and falling asleep with his outstretched legs draped over me. I cooked for him. Cleaned him. Wheeled him around his city. I came home from Tesco's, to find that he'd retrieved the gun somehow. He said he had done it himself. Told me how hard it had been. Left nothing out, bluntly told me that he had cut his arm and it needed stitches. Go and get the med kit. Then Jim said to me, that if I took it away again, he'd shoot both of us in the stomach and make me watch him die.

That broke me. I let him keep the gun.

I knew how he was different now. I saw it in his eyes, the way he watches his phone, the way he watched me walk. How he watched other people walk, his eyes focused on the fluidity of their motion. Torture was different too. Now he would go for the legs first. Cutting tendon, nerves, severing muscles. Leaving them in the long, dark basement. They were at one end, food was at the other.

I knew Jim had always found it hard to keep himself going... He just couldn't do it anymore. The Fall had shown him how close death was, his health had pushed him into living his personal death. In Hell, he would be welcomed. Jim would walk with Satan and discuss the merits of the kitchen butter knife and whisk as instruments of torture. It was too tantalising for him. We both knew it. Judgement Day was here.

I would go down to hell with him.

On the last day, I wheeled him around London from sunrise. Jim enjoyed it, listening to Burl Ives on his iPod and pointing at all the lonely people hanging around at ten in the morning. Jim was holding a dark green violin case. It had one hand gun in it and in the hand gun were two bullets. It was so clichéd, it hurt. Or maybe that feeling was the horrible realisation that we were going to die. But it was okay, kinda'. We were going to die together. Just before we did it, I was going to ask Jim if he loved me. He would say yes and we could die together, go to Hell together. We had breakfast and began our final march through London, we'd be dead by one o'clock.

SEVEN MINUTES TO GO

We stopped outside the Victoria Memorial, the day was cloudy and grey but that didn't stop the persistent tourists from milling about and snapping photos. Jim did say that it was a perfect, typical London morning and a wonderful day to go. All the hairs on my spine stood up on end.

Jim couldn't wait to die.

FIVE MINUTES TO GO

I sat on the steps, directly under Queen Victoria herself, with Jim beside me. We looked all the way down the Mall and watched the people in silence. To other people we were an invalid and his aid, not the greatest criminal ever to walk the earth and his personal sniper.

Nobody would ask us to move.

THREE MINUTES TO GO

We were blindingly average right now. Jim and I exchanged looks when the tourists looked sadly at us and smiled politely. I knew Jim wanted to laugh, to scream, to jump in their space and rip their pitying faces off but instead he smiled back. Only I knew the dark rip in sanity that coiled behind the expensive sun glasses, I held that in my head. Held the fact, that I was the only one who would ever know him.

TWO MINUTES TO GO

Jim shifted in his wheelchair, motioned subtly for me to retrieve his iPod for him. I watched him carefully plug in his earphones and scroll through his extensive collection of songs. He offered an ear phone to me and I gladly put it in. I didn't really like this silence when I was so used to Jim's noise. I knew what this meant now, I took the violin case and unzipped it carefully. I took out the gun and examined it for a moment, it was the new gun I had thrown behind the telly. I suddenly felt some tiny bit of remorse for stabbing Alfie. There was a bit of commotion, as expected but nobody bothered us, really. Placing the violin case on the ground, I moved round to kneel in front of Jim's wheelchair.

I felt him replace my fallen earphone and the twangs of Burl Ives' "Buckeye Jim" filled my head.

ONE MINUTE TO GO

"Buckeye Jim, can't go,"

"Weave or spin, Can't go,"

"Buckeye Jim"

I smiled at how right this all was.

Two bullets. Two men. Two lives.

I would shoot Jim first, then myself. I placed the barrel of the gun against his forehead, breathing deeply now. This was it. We could live eternal in Hell. He smiled. Nothing else but this would matter now.

"I love you. Jim Moriarty" I said, mouthing my next question. The all important one. I blatantly, silently, asked him if he loves me.

"Buckeye Jim, can't go,"

"Weave or spin, Can't go,"

"Buckeye Jim"

One word.

"No."

The gun slides out of my hand.

Jim catches it in his lap, whips it up, lightning, into his mouth and this time it's for real. Blood, Jim and earphone spatters everywhere. Queen Victoria is bleeding too.

I jump forward, howling and grab the gun.

Press it to my own head. Whisper, "But I loved you." and pull, eyes wide open.

"Click"

"Click."

"Click. Click. Cli-CLi-Cli-Click."

I howl. I vomit.

Only one bullet. There was only ever one.

I slide away in red.

I slide away from everything and now I'm in solitary.

Won't have to look at all the hundreds of people. I like this better than real life.

It has a radio in here, but it only ever plays one song.

"Buckeye Jim, can't go,"

"Weave or spin, Can't go,"

"Buckeye Jim"

I see doctors but they only ever say three words.

"Click".

"No".

"Ice".

Even now when the IceMan comes to take this from me, I will only ever be able to say two things.

"I hate you, Jim Moriarty. I love you, Jim Moriarty."

He's left me a gun today.

It only ever has one bullet.


End file.
